So I did end up making a new twitter and I should probably be keeping more of an eye on my usage. Oddly I was locked out of desktop usage for a few months with this new account so I had to use the app. Since I've regained desktop access I should probably uninstall the app but it's useful to have access on the go particularly for posting music and pictures. That's how they get you. The app also gets me looking at trends which isn't healthy especially with all the bad news at the moment. I've seen some pretty awful imagery without intending to and as I write this I'm thinking it might be best to just get rid even if that limits me to posting at certain times.
Another bad habit I risk getting back into with twitter is yeeting my thoughts into the void and I stopped myself yesterday because I wanted to talk about Inscryption which I just finished and thought there was no way any of my mutuals would have any spoiler tags muted for this specifically. It was bad enough I'd been staying with friends whilst finishing it and internally cringing at the fact I was spoiling them for the final act of something I wanted to encourage them to play. Then I remembered I have this site(!)
Spoilers begin
I had been apprehensive about the game because it's a card game and in real life that is not my thing, I can't follow rules very well so I just lose, lol. Video games let you learn at your own pace, however. I died to Leshy a lot before I was able to beat him and because the game carries over elements you've unlocked between runs I did get there eventually. In fact I discovered close to the end that I hadn't actually unlocked every 'helper' element but then I beat him anyway.
I wasn't surprised by the subsequent twists happening because I knew going into it that this was a 'twisty' game. I wanted to play it in the first place because I knew it was more than a simple card game that I wouldn't normally be interested in. So it surprised me when I ended up quite enjoying the card gameplay. Mainly how it was possible, with good luck, to combine powerful sigils and upgrades to make really broken cards. Since I feel I don't understand complex mechanics and strategy very well I prefer to rely on raw power, lol.
Though I already knew it was a game with twists this didn't ruin the story for me. I also feel like I unintentionally added another layer of story by pure coincidence (and this is what I wanted to tweet about). We learn we're actually playing the game within a game as Luke, a youtuber who appears in found footage that loads from his camera between acts of the game. Files accessed from his computer reveal his sister El died at some point. El could actually be short for my name. In the first act you're told to put your name on the deathcards when you lose. So I was putting my name on the cards, which could possibly also be the name of Luke's dead sister??? It seems they were both fans of card games so in my particular playthrough it's like Luke was playing for her as well! In fact, I wasn't sure that maybe the name of the sister could be a dynamic element based on your own username or what you'd put into the deathcards. I think it really was a coincidence but that's the sort of mindset the game puts you into, how it messes with your head by showing you things it shouldn't be able to. And this was on Switch, whereas the PC version does look at your actual harddrive. So it's impressive how it was still able to mess with me to that extent. I was amused to be able to show my friends how the game had made cards out of their own Switch profiles.
I really love stories with meta elements and that's what had me enthused about this game when it came to the conclusion. The mysteries aren't all solved in the end which got me looking into the ARG. Particularly it seemed obvious to me that someone must have gone looking at the real-life coordinates where Luke finds the game buried. It's long over now, but I'd love to get involved in something similar one day. For my writing, I've thought about creating websites that supplement the story, provide additional information and basically act as marketing in a way that doesn't involve traditional advertisement. I have seriously wondered about the environmental impact of printing QR codes and hiding them in secret locations in the countryside (and, uh, the legality of doing that). I think I would have to be really sure what I had was good before I did anything like that! The Inscryption ARG was insanely layered and detailed and I can appreciate the amount of effort and craft that goes into something like that, even if the hidden secrets in it didn't particularly impress me, I don't think I would want any truly significant information to have been excluded from the game itself and I thought the story as it was presented within the game as I played it was sufficient. Leaving things unexplained can add to the feeling you're left with.
Spoilers end
So I'm sticking to writing stories that are just stories for the time being. Since August I have been rewriting the Big... not sure what to call it anymore, rural-urban alternate universe sci-fi fantasy. I started off creating a pamphlet as a preface that doesn't have much direct relevance to the story but establishes that this is an alternate universe- it's a cutesy pamphlet made by the church to help people celebrate the most important festival in the calendar, which is not equivalent to anything in real life and therefore I hope helps set the tone. I say I'm just writing stories but I do enjoy making these bits of documentation to supplement the prose (ugh, I don't feel comfortable describing what I write as 'prose' because it's not good lol). From there I simply started writing from the beginning. On previous attempts I'd found I was getting bogged down because the events that I found I was describing were just dumb. I thought about instead, for the first part at least, leaning into how dumb this all was and describing events from the point of view of the most Ordinary character who has to come to terms with the fact the way things are is not normal and he can't ignore everything that's happening. So far, it's working. Soon I'll get to a point where I need more POVs with different outlooks, but in the past I've had less trouble writing those characters so hopefully everything will keep going okay.
As it is I'm going to have to take a break from this project in November to work on my other story for Nanowrimo. I last did Nano in 2018 for a truncated version of the above and if I was doing a wordcount I don't remember what it was. It ended about halfway through the scope of the current story on a vague sequel hook and a lot of it as I remember just feels meh. This year I will be working on the... Victorian academic fantasy romance (book 1 of trilogy). I have written bits of this before but not attempted a true draft until now, and I'm very excited to see what comes out of it. Some parts of this will be challenging (points at the word 'romance') but I want to do it because I want to write something I would want to read. Did I mention it's also very inspired by 80s music... mainly goth, synthpop and some rock as well. Spillover into the 70s and 90s where applicable. And I have a whole other playlist for more modern songs that relate to it. It's broader influence than I might have cared to admit at one point.
The biggest issue is the wordcount. The standard Nano wordcount is 50k and I don't see anything near that happening during November with a full-time job. For context I've more or less spent as much time as is socially acceptable writing since late August and only managed 25k. So I'm just going to try and do what I can with maybe 10k target increments.
The important thing is I AM CREATING and it feels great!! :))))))